THE EVOLUTION OF POLICIES 195

generation carried all his life insurance on this plan, and the same is now true of the greatest American actuary now living.

To meet the ordinary man's deep-rooted objection to having paid his money for nothing, as he would put it, in case his beneficiary dies first, the payment of the proceeds of a life insurance in instalments was introduced, the instalments running over a period of ten, fifteen or twenty years. As has already been explained, the company needed only to charge for this form of insurance the premium which it would charge for a lump sum insurance for the amount of the commuted value of the instalments. This commuted value in the cases of most policies issued before 1900 was computed at 4 per cent. interest; of policies issued since then, at 31 per cent. by some companies and at 3 per cent. by others. A very few companies pay the net surplus interest realised on the fund, as a cash dividend, with each instalment. The instalment plan could be and usually is applied to all the usual forms of policies when desired.

The ordinary man soon found an objection to this; having run out, it might and in many cases would leave the beneficiary without an income precisely in her old age when this would be most inconvenient.

To meet this objection Emory McClintock, actuary of the largest company, invented a very